Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 550 Dog Days, Part 2.

We left things off last time in the dog-eat-dog world of colonial pet politics, and by the way,

I think I was remarkably restrained in the number of puns I could have made, but chose not to.

If I had to briefly summarize last week's episode, the core notion was that a lot of modern

ideas about pet ownership date back to Victorian England in the Age of Imperialism, and those

ideas were carried around the world by colonial powers, whose treatment of their own animals,

as well as local ones,

reflected their views of colonial hierarchy. Obviously, there was a little bit more to it than that,

but I think as summaries go, that's pretty much it. But the story is not yet complete, because as

anyone who's lived in Japan can tell you, the pet culture of the modern country has changed quite a bit in the last past century and a half or so.

Dogs are now a part of the fabric of daily life, in a mode that is a lot closer to

modernized pet ownership, so how did that come to be?

As a quick reminder, for most of Japanese history, dog ownership was restricted to the upper classes.

Wealthy ladies might own a chin or Japanese spaniel kept as a lapdog, and the closest equivalent to a modern pet.

An elite member of the samurai class, meanwhile, might keep hunting dogs, as might the small populations of hunting

communities in the Japanese interior.

But most people did not own dogs at all, and only really interacted with dogs in the form

of semi-feral packs that roamed the major cities.

Those packs lived off the trash, and might serve a role as guard dogs for a neighborhood.

A family might even start feeding one and using it as a guard dog to, say, take care of a family business associated with a storehouse,

but they were not kept as pets, and were not so used to humans as a modern domesticated dog would be.

But after the fall of the feudal system in 1868, and even for a few years before, dog ownership

...